Latest blog posts

We always strive to be first. For some people it becomes an obsession. It becomes their reason for living. Their reason for cheating... nobody remembers second they reason. This seems to be the way in most endeavours - except for banking. The industry that invented the ‘fast follower’ concept has started to struggle. The mentality to be firs...

Recently I was talking to the department head of a leading bank. She told me that her salespeople were using iPads. "Great, What do they use them for?", I asked her and she said "To login remotely to our CRM system". Wow, I thought, what could be a more inefficient way of leveraging mobility. Casting away all the inh...

It occurred to me the other day that in a world where everything seems to come in cycles, market data appears to be no different. If you go back as far as I do in this business and I’m guessing that ...

Few can have missed the fact that Germany is set to go it alone on curbing HFT, although it looks like the rest of Europe won’t be too far behind. The proposed European legislation will insist upon a...

Cash don't disappear- that is a fact. Don't deny it. Or is it possible to replace cash with alternative low cost solution. For laymans terms, cash is low cost payment method. But as everyone who know...

Google Wallet is flying high. Literally. Earlier this month, it announced that it was moving to the cloud so that it would be able to accept a variety of credit and debit cards. What is it about this ...

Technophobes and security pundits have been warning us for a long time that it’s possible for a passerby with an RFID reader – and malafide intent – to skim debit / credit card details off contactless...

Part 4 Authors: Kersten Martin Meyer and Tom Riesack Collateral: banks, broker-dealers, funds and clearinghouses all need it more than ever. Collateralisation of bilateral as well as cleared OTC trade...

In an era of increased regulation, with stiff competition from other banks for business with blue-chip corporates and a lower appetite for risk, where can regional banks turn to for long-term sustaina...

It took almost two decades for credit card payments (followed by debit cards) to become globally ubiquitous, so it might be reasonable to think that a paradigm shift at the POS will take years to beco...